There is a society in the deepest solitude.
- Isaac D'Israeli, Literary Character of Men of Genius
(ch. X)

So vain is the belief
That the sequestered path has fewest flowers.
- Thomas Doubleday, Sonnet--The Poet's Solitude

Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove,
Far from the clamorous world; doth live his own;
Though solitary, who is not alone,
But doth converse with that eternal love.
- William Drummond (1), Urania; or, Spiritual Poems

Such only can enjoy the country who are capable of thinking when
they are there; then they are prepared for solitude, and in that
ease solitude is prepared for them.
- John Dryden

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious
in the years of maturity.
- Albert Einstein

I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony
of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
- Albert Einstein

Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets,
great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern
friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which
will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire
and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls
of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the
daily timeworn yoke of their opinions.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with
perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares
all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay,
insulting; society will retaliate.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalist lecture at the Boston Masonic Temple, Dec. 1840

When we withdraw from human intercourse into solitude, we are
more peculiarly committed in the presence of the divinity; yet
some men retire into solitude to devise or perpetrate crimes.
This is like a man going to meet and brave a lion in his own
gloomy desert, in the very precincts of his dread abode.
- John Foster (1)

There is always a part of our being into which those who are
dearer to us far than our own lives are yet unable to enter.
- James Anthony Froude

We enter the world alone, we leave it alone.
- James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects--Sea Studies

I was never less alone than when by myself.
- Edward Gibbon, Memoirs (vol. I, p. 117)